Agent Barsik (Cat, Smart Pet)

Two days later the Commander came back, and this time he came to the bureau's own terminal, because the records he wanted were Eden's, and Eden's records live here.

Barsik watched from the cabinet top. The trainee watched from a mug on the Senior Sergeant's desk, which was her exercise for the week: sit in the mug, and count who walks past without looking twice. Nobody looks twice at a rabbit in a mug. That is the whole point of her.

The Commander did not sit down. He read, and typed, and read again, and the screen gave him the four stamps it had been giving everyone. Barsik could see the glow of it on the man's face, and he saw the moment the face changed. The screen had been told not to show one number. The Commander knew a way of asking that Eden's people did not, and the screen showed him.

Then he did the thing Barsik liked. He printed it.

One page. A long code with one number circled, twice, hard enough that the pen had nearly gone through. The Commander looked at the screen, then at the paper, then at the screen again, and Barsik understood the look without needing it said. A screen shows you what it has been told to show, and it can be told something else tomorrow. Paper shows you what was on it the day it was printed, and nobody has ever told a sheet of paper anything. Barsik has sat on a great deal of paper. He would know.

The Inspector pretended not to watch any of this. He is bad at pretending not to watch, which is one of the reasons he is good at his job.

The Commander folded the page into the file, patted Barsik on the way past, and went to the lift. The lift goes up, towards the Compact's offices, where there is an office that reads every report from all five habitats, and a man in it who is said to read them himself. Barsik has never met him. He has read a few of the memos that come down from that office, upside down, which is the only way he reads anything.

When the lift door had closed, the screen on the Inspector's terminal went back to showing four stamps, exactly as it had been told.

The trainee's log got a line that evening, because she had asked, in her way, why the Commander wanted paper when the screen was faster. He wrote: A screen tells you what it has been told to tell you. Paper tells you what was true on the day it was printed. On this habitat the second kind is rarer, and it is the only kind that leaves.

He stayed on the cabinet, where he could see the screen and the door at the same time. It is the only place on this floor worth sitting, and he made sure, years ago, that nobody else wanted it.